870 research outputs found

    Representations of migrant and nation in selected works of Rohinton Mistry and Salman Rushdie

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    This thesis explores the representations of, and the relationship between. the migrant and the nation in selected works of the Bombay-born novelists Rohinton Mistry and Salman Rushdie. I explore each writer's engagement with contemporary debates surrounding the material, political, social and imaginative consequences of the crisis in secularism in India during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and consider how this engagement is informed by their migrant positions beyond India's borders. A primary concern is the way in which Mistry's and Rushdie's representations of the nation, and of migrant and diasporic subjects, intersects with the representation of Bombay in their work. This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first two chapters concentrate on Mistry's fiction, the remaining three on Rushdie's work. Published between 1988 and 2002, the central novels examined are situated within debates regarding the founding principles of the Indian nation, and notions of Indianness, the rise of communalism in general and Hindu nationalism in particular, and the renaming of Bombay as Mumbai. My readings foreground the necessity of a close understanding of the historical and political transformations taking place within Bombay and India during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, but also during the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that Mistry's and Rushdie's work is informed by a deepening anxiety over these socio-political transformations, and over how reconfigurations of Indianness increasingly position minority communities, and migrant and diasporic subjects, outside of definitions of national identity. This anxiety extends into the negotiation of their own migrant positions. My reading of the differing representations of the migrant in Mistry's and Rushdie's work engages with ideas of accountability, political responsibility, and with notions of cosmopolitanism. In doing so, I question familiar assumptions regarding the migrant condition as one of predominantly empowering political agency. I argue that, while both authors emphasise the importance of the migrant sustaining a critical engagement with India's politics, they also foreground the anxious difficulties of doing so. This difficulty informs Mistry's and Rushdie's divergent negotiation of their own position as migrant writers, and I examine how their fiction is marked by an anxiety over the adequacy of writing as a mode of political engagement with the crisis in secularism and the parochialisation of Bombay, and as a means of negotiating the politics of migrancy

    The translation of identity in the satanic verses: a love song to our mongrel selves

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    This thesis examines the translation of character identities within Salman Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, and seeks to demonstrate how the dynamics of translating a text can be used as a model for discussing the transformations of characters within the book. Rushdie uses the term "translation" as a metaphor for the migrant experience of uprootedness that is a result of being "borne across" from one culture to another. From it, however, can be derived a metaphor for the universal experience of alienation that is a part of our shared humanity, and which describes the process of responding to a sense of "otherness" within ourselves and within a pluralistic culture. The framework which will be used to examine characters within The Satanic Verses responding to such conditions is George Steiner's translation hermeneutic outlined and discussed In his book. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. The Introduction will set the context for the use of the term "translation”. Chapter One will discuss Steiner's position within translation theory and Rushdie's affinity to it as well as explain the basic translation model. Chapters Two through Five will look closely at Rushdie's text, analyzing the two protagonists, Gibreel and Saladin, as they undergo, or fail to undergo, the translation process. Finally, the conclusion will suggest that the Rushdie affair engendered by this novel is, ironically, a linguistic debate provoked by a text that urges its readers to be translated. By making its readers acutely aware of what is "other" to them, the The Satanic Verses proposes and attempts to answer a single, profoundly religious, question: "How are we to live in the world?

    Salman Rushdie in the Cultural Marketplace

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    Taking up the roles that Salman Rushdie himself has assumed as a cultural broker, gatekeeper, and mediator in various spheres of public production, Ana Cristina Mendes situates his work in terms of the contemporary production, circulation, and consumption of postcolonial texts within the workings of the cultural industries. Mendes pays particular attention to Rushdie as a public performer across various creative platforms, not only as a novelist and short story writer, but also as a public intellectual, reviewer, and film critic. Mendes argues that how a postcolonial author becomes personally and professionally enmeshed in the dealings of the cultural industries is of particular relevance at a time when the market is strictly regulated by a few multinational corporations. She contends that marginality should not be construed exclusively as a basis for understanding Rushdie’s work, since a critical grounding in marginality will predictably involve a reproduction of the traditional postcolonial binaries of oppressor/oppressed and colonizer/colonized that the writer subverts. Rather, she seeks to expand existing interpretations of Rushdie’s work, itineraries, and frameworks in order to take into account the actual conditions of postcolonial cultural production and circulation within a marketplace that is global in both orientation and effects.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Salman Rushdie in the Cultural Marketplace

    No full text
    Taking up the roles that Salman Rushdie himself has assumed as a cultural broker, gatekeeper, and mediator in various spheres of public production, Ana Cristina Mendes situates his work in terms of the contemporary production, circulation, and consumption of postcolonial texts within the workings of the cultural industries. Mendes pays particular attention to Rushdie as a public performer across various creative platforms, not only as a novelist and short story writer, but also as a public intellectual, reviewer, and film critic. Mendes argues that how a postcolonial author becomes personally and professionally enmeshed in the dealings of the cultural industries is of particular relevance at a time when the market is strictly regulated by a few multinational corporations. She contends that marginality should not be construed exclusively as a basis for understanding Rushdie’s work, since a critical grounding in marginality will predictably involve a reproduction of the traditional postcolonial binaries of oppressor/oppressed and colonizer/colonized that the writer subverts. Rather, she seeks to expand existing interpretations of Rushdie’s work, itineraries, and frameworks in order to take into account the actual conditions of postcolonial cultural production and circulation within a marketplace that is global in both orientation and effects.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Salman Rushdie in the Cultural Marketplace

    No full text
    Taking up the roles that Salman Rushdie himself has assumed as a cultural broker, gatekeeper, and mediator in various spheres of public production, Ana Cristina Mendes situates his work in terms of the contemporary production, circulation, and consumption of postcolonial texts within the workings of the cultural industries. Mendes pays particular attention to Rushdie as a public performer across various creative platforms, not only as a novelist and short story writer, but also as a public intellectual, reviewer, and film critic. Mendes argues that how a postcolonial author becomes personally and professionally enmeshed in the dealings of the cultural industries is of particular relevance at a time when the market is strictly regulated by a few multinational corporations. She contends that marginality should not be construed exclusively as a basis for understanding Rushdie’s work, since a critical grounding in marginality will predictably involve a reproduction of the traditional postcolonial binaries of oppressor/oppressed and colonizer/colonized that the writer subverts. Rather, she seeks to expand existing interpretations of Rushdie’s work, itineraries, and frameworks in order to take into account the actual conditions of postcolonial cultural production and circulation within a marketplace that is global in both orientation and effects.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Trends. Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasrin: Terrorists?

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    The author discusses fatwas that have been issued against United Kingdom\u27s Salman Rushdie and Bangladesh\u27s Taslima Nasrin
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